Crisis On Infinite Midlives

Justice League #6 is the most memorable and remarkable of the title’s relaunch for two reasons, the first being that it is packed with the kind of cover-to-cover superhero action that you want from a team comic book. The second is that it contains a splash page depicting Cyborg with a stance and facial expression that, minus any context, looks like he’s taking a savage and angry dump so terrible it might alter his religious beliefs. Which is as good an example of the schizo feeling this book has instilled in me for the past six months.

Let’s start off for a change on a positive note: this is one hell of a superhero fight. Writer Geoff Johns establishes the stakes early, showing a desperate family trying to escape the Armageddon that is occurring as Green Lantern, Flash, Wonder Woman, Aquaman and Cyborg battle Darkseid in the middle of a city. The battle is visceral, the feeling that the heroes are throwing every Goddamned thing they can think of at Darkseid, who is drawn by Jim Lee as solid, giant and implacable. This is the kind of epic throwdown that I’ve been wanting from Justice League from the word go… which is a damn good thing because many of the characters still act as if they’re recovering from a partial lobotomy.

Johns’s characterizations have been problematic throughout this arc. Yes, I understand this is a reboot, but the youngest character in this book, in terms of creation date, is Cyborg, who has almost a third of a century of previous characterization history behind him. And sometimes we get glimmers of the long-established behaviors of the characters, but other times they act like they were created by Rob Liefeld in a 1990 cocaine twitch. Sometimes within two panels.

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